Rock ‘n’ roll Britannia

LONDON — The stage lights break across the crowd in rainbows from above, while artificial mist nips at their heels. The guy to my right stares at the stage, transfixed. He appears to be on something stronger than my ale, but I can relate.

The maniacal three-piece band churns out its rhythms, locomotive-like. The bassist standing beside the speaker, feels loud enough to reset my heartbeat. The drummer flails wildly, punctuating the licks of the tall, Afro-sporting left-hander, who wields his Fender Stratocaster like a toy. The fringes on the sleeves of his jacket hang vertically each time he raises his arm, shaman-like, to punctuate the next chord, and the next.

It’s London. The Marquee Club. It’s happenin’.

It’s December, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience we are watching is only projected on a retractable screen, the music pre-recorded, the lights set up to roughly complement the music. Never mind that Mr. Hendrix has been dead nearly 35 years and that the Marquee, reopened last year, is now four times removed from its original location. Or that an actual live band is to play later in the night. (No one seems to know who.)

The early crowd has gathered to view the largest exhibition of Hendrix memorabilia in the world — guitars, hand-scrawled first drafts of songs, concert posters and 2,000 hours of video footage constantly playing on the stage level, along with the light show.

It makes sense, actually. In reopening the Marquee at 1 Leicester Square, the new owners are involved in the latest attempt not only to cash in on, but also to preserve some of the heady magic of London in the swinging ‘60s. That era was, first and foremost, always about the music.

Although rock was invented in the United States, London is its capital city, thanks to the unlikely work of a group of mostly middle-class teenagers growing up in a Britain still recovering from World War II.

In the early 1960s, budding musicians such as Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton heard something authentic in the music American GIs left behind after the war — jazz, country and especially blues. Soon, they were sending away to America for recordings.

“As far as the record companies or the news media or anything, we were all ignored until those English kids came in,” legendary bluesman Buddy Guy says in Martin Scorsese’s “The Blues.” But in less than half a decade, these British youths’ peculiar tastes and rebellious attitudes — and their unusual musical virtuosity — would propel a musical and cultural revolution.

Those were the days of rock idols and guitar heroes, before pop music became divided and segmented. England’s economy was booming, class structures were beginning to crack along with taboos against drugs and sex, and pop art and fashion (some would say decadence) were on the rise.

In 1966, Time magazine proclaimed in a famous cover story: “[a]s never before in modern times, London is switched on. Ancient elegance and new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur of op and pop.” Musicians, artists and other bohemians were the new aristocrats. It wasn’t long after the Beatles exploded out of Liverpool that “Clapton is God” graffiti appeared on subways.

England remains the third-largest market for music in the world and the second-largest source of written music. And London is a city where history seeps up through the pavement, where past is always prologue. Even though many clubs have closed since the ‘60s, London still has about 600 live-music venues.

I have set out to discover just how much of this heritage endures, either in its original form or preserved as exhibits or simply in memory.

So I turn to Richard Porter, an affable music nut who presides over the London Beatles Fan Club and who wrote a book called “Guide to the Beatles’ London,” to walk me around rock sites in town and share the stories behind them.

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